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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1103 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for November 6, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Movies I have watched or re-watched recently:

Lake Placid (1999): Loved it! I don't care what anybody says, this is a much better movie than Jaws (1975); the pacing is faster, the characters are more endearing, the dialogue is funnier, and the special effects are prettier (the croc holds up very well for being a quarter-century old). Only the music is worse (nothing can compare to the legendary shark theme), but even then I found the use of Bob Marley's "Is This Love" at the end to be quite charming.

I was a little surprised by how open the characters are sexually; they don't actually show anything, but the female deputy literally tries to stop the rich guy from diving into the beast's lair by offering to sleep with him. I guess 90s movies were wilder than I remember.

Pearl Harbor (2001): Famously summarized by Roger Ebert as "a two-hour movie squeezed into three hours, about how on Dec. 7, 1941, the Japanese staged a surprise attack on an American love triangle." That description is not wrong, exactly, but it makes it sound worse than it really is. Yes, as a result of the popularity of Titanic (1997), the movie was changed from a straight remake of Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970) into a historical romance. And, yes, the Doolittle raid was unnecessary; the movie could have perfectly well climaxed with the attack on Pearl Harbor. But, for all of that, I found it very watchable. The two men had no chemistry with the female lead, but they sure as hell had it with each other, a bit like a live-action version of The Road to El Dorado (2000).

I actually watched this movie with my mother. It is very hard to find movies to watch with her, because she refuses to watch anything animated, anything science fiction or fantasy, and anything without a Spanish dub, while I refuse to watch terrible Netflix movies full of unnecessary gay characters and true crime slop. Her main takeaway was that the Chinese are bastards for bombing those poor people on the streets, and that I should not marry a Chinese woman. I tried to explain to her that A) the Japanese were the ones bombing Pearl Harbor; China was on the Allied side of the war, and B) Japan never bombed the hospital; that would be a war crime. She replied that "they can't make stuff up", therefore it must be true. So my main takeaway is how important it is to control what normies see onscreen, because to them, that is reality.

Loved it! I don't care what anybody says, this is a much better movie than Jaws (1975)

Wow.

I mean de gustibus non est disputandum but this is an interesting one.

Do you usually not like films with a more measured pace? Any examples of other "everyone loves this" movies that you are meh on?

Do you usually not like films with a more measured pace? Any examples of other "everyone loves this" movies that you are meh on?

Pretty much. I also thought Kiki's Delivery Service (1989) was slow and boring despite its 98% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I much prefer Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986), Princess Mononoke (1997) and Grave of the Fireflies (1988) from the same studio.

On the other hand, I have also seen movies ruined by too fast pacing, such as Armageddon (1998). Deep Impact (1998) is better, despite being slower.

From "Reasons Hataraku Maou-sama is Objectively Good" by suntzuanime:

A show can be thought of as a collection of interesting bits, things which advance the plot, develop a character, introduce an idea, make you laugh make you cry, and so on. (This may not apply to slice-of-life shows, whose selling point is how uninteresting they are.) After each interesting bit happens, it takes you time to process what’s going on with the plot, or dry your tears, or whatever. If the next interesting bit happens before you finish, you won’t be able to keep up, and you’ll find the show bewildering. If the next interesting bit hasn’t started yet by the time you’re done, your mind will wander, and you’ll find the show boring. There’s a narrow window that the show has to hit for maximum enjoyment. In practice most shows err on the side of slow pacing, because interesting bits are hard to come up with. (Consider shows like Dragonball Z, which when they run out of content from the manga resort to shots of people yelling to charge up their spirit for minutes on end.) Because of this, as a general rule, the faster a show is paced, the better it is.

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